


Perception

by DiscontentedWinter



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Corpses, Eichen | Echo House, Horror Elements, Lawyer Peter Hale, M/M, Murder, Nogitsune Stiles Stilinski, Nogitsune Trauma, Spark Claudia Stilinski, fandomcares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:46:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25280338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: Peter Hale's client is a murderous sociopath. The best thing Peter can do is get him committed to Eichen House, where he'll never see daylight again.He thinks.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 179
Kudos: 1238
Collections: Fandom Cares





	Perception

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Akumanie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumanie/gifts).



> This is a fic for akumanie on Tumblr. Thank you for bidding on me for Fandomcares! I hope you enjoy it!

The boy is crazy. Peter Hale is paying thousands of dollars in fees for a couple of expert doctors to make the official diagnosis on that—he’s sure it’ll be some tongue-twister of a word he’ll have to practice a few times in front of the mirror so he doesn’t fuck it up in court—but when all is said and done, the boy’s plain fucking crazy. Peter has the CCTV footage that proves it. Still, there’s no way that even with one of the best defence attorneys in the country—and Peter is one of the best—that the boy is ever walking free again. The best Peter can do for him is to get him sentenced to Eichen House instead of prison, so that’s what he fully intends to do. 

He came back to New York for this, thankful he’d never let his bar association membership lapse in California. He came back because Talia asked. She didn’t insist, but then again, she didn’t have to. She’s the alpha. 

She’s the alpha of the Hale pack, and the Hales owe the Stilinskis. They have done ever since Claudia Stilinski warned them that the Argents were intending to lock them inside their house with mountain ash and burn the whole place down. 

Claudia Stilinski. 

Peter taps his pen on the pages of his planner while he thinks of her. 

She was crazy too, in her own way. 

She might have had a vision about a fire that killed all the Hales—and prevented it from happening by telling them—but she also tried to kill her own son in the weeks before her death. Looking back, Peter’s not sure that was crazy at all, actually. 

He’s seen the CCTV footage. He’s seen the smiling kid walk into the police station. Seen him hug the female deputy—Graeme, Tara Graeme—only to pull back with her firearm in his unshaking hand. He’s seen the shot that killed her. Peter’s seen a lot of things in his career, but the way the kid kept smiling was fucking chilling. As chilling as the footage from nine minutes later, when Stiles is digging his bloody fingers into his father’s chest, the knife discarded on the floor beside him, and closing them around his beating heart. 

John Stilinski survived, somehow. 

He’s been in hospital since, but he survived. 

Talia might feel that she owes Claudia Stilinski, but when the son attacked the father, whose side are they supposed to be on? 

That philosophical question is Talia’s to wrangle with. All Peter can do is the job he’s been given, to the very best of his ability. 

And today he has to try to get Stiles Stilinski prepared for court. 

***** 

“My mother tried to kill me when I was twelve years old,” Stiles says on the stand. The black shadows under his eyes make him appear ghoulish. “She thought that I was going to kill her, so she tried to kill me first. She was crazy too.” 

Peter resists banging his head on the table. He forces a smile instead. “Stiles, Dr. Morell has told the court that you have Dissociative Identity Disorder, and that, for want of a better word, you manifest a secondary personality. Is that true?” 

Stiles blinks at him. 

“Is that true?” Peter asks. 

“That’s what Dr. Morell says,” Stiles says at last, his voice so low with suspicion and barely repressed anger that Peter is tempted to ask to have his own client listed as a hostile witness. 

“You shot and killed Deputy Tara Graeme,” Peter says. 

“I don’t…” A hint of panic flashes across the boy’s face. “I don’t remember that.” 

Peter glances at the judge. “Does Void remember?” 

Stiles jiggles his leg. “I don’t know.” 

Peter raises his eyebrows. “Is Void here?” 

“Oh, _come on_ ,” the prosecutor mutters under his breath, chair legs scraping as he stands. He clears his throat. “Objection, you honor. What is the defense counsel trying to do here? Call an alternate personality as a witness?” 

Peter throws the judge an innocent look. 

“Mr. Hale,” the judge says in a low voice, giving him an unimpressed stare over the top of her glasses. 

“My mom was crazy,” Stiles says suddenly, and _there_ it is. His eyes appear darker, his face more sunken. Even the pitch of his voice has changed. “My mom was crazy and she tried to kill me. And he didn’t protect me! He never protected me!” His voice rises and then he’s yelling, the deputies doing court duty moving forward, hands on their Tasers, just in case. “I hated him! Why shouldn’t he hurt? Why _shouldn’t_ he? I wanted to rip his heart out with my hands!” 

Stiles slumps back into his seat, his head hanging and his breath rasping. 

For a moment Peter’s heart beats faster. If he didn’t know for a fact that Beacon Hills was protected by the Nemeton… If he didn’t know for a fact that there was no way it was possible, he might wonder exactly what Stiles _is_. 

It’s a neat trick, to be able to scare a werewolf. 

But then Stiles lifts his head again, his gaze doe-eyed, both wary and confused. He says, in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “I’m sorry, what was the question?” 

Peter’s shaken, and he’s not the only one. 

He catches the gaze of the prosecutor, and then the judge. They’re both experienced enough to tell theatre from the real deal. Neither of them are going to push back too hard against those expert doctors, Peter guesses. 

Stiles Stilinski will be going to Eichen House, and he’ll be staying there until he dies of old age. 

And everyone in the courtroom knows it’s for the best. 

***** 

The rain batters the windshield as Peter drives home that evening. Strange. He hasn’t lived in Beacon Hills for twenty years, but this old house is somehow still home. It’s pack and family. It’s a thousand different childhood memories, all wrapped up in the voices and laughter of family members who have passed: Peter’s parents, his grandmother, a white-haired great-grandfather who barely spoke a word of English and died before Peter could figure out exactly where he fit in. Their gentle losses are recompensed with new additions: babies who smell like milk, toddlers with sticky hands, and kids who run through the hallways like whirlwinds. The seasons always renew. 

Peter shakes off the rain as he enters the house and heads down the hallway to Talia’s office. He closes the door behind him. 

“Tell me about Claudia,” he says, pouring himself a glass of whiskey. 

Talia exhales. “She was a spark, I suspect.” 

“Stiles said she tried to kill him.”

Talia presses her mouth into a line. “She had visions, John said. She also had dementia, which gave her hallucinations. She saw Stiles trying to kill her, so she tried to kill him first. Fortunately John stopped her, but not before she hurt him.” 

Peter swirls the whiskey around in the bottom of his glass and raises his eyebrows. “Given what he did to his father, are we sure it was fortunate?” 

“Peter.” 

“I’m just saying, what if they weren’t hallucinations?”

“I don’t know.” Talia shakes her head. “She was right about the fire, and she warned us. John was sure though that the one about Stiles trying to kill her… well, he brushed it off. Said it was the dementia. He was sure she wasn’t lucid at the time.” 

Peter can read Talia like a book. He sees the doubt in her eyes. “And?” 

Talia sighs. “And apparently she had another vision that Stiles would kill John.” 

“Well, two out of three ain’t bad,” Peter says wryly, and tips the whiskey down his throat. 

It burns all the way.

*****

Beacon Hills is a town gently cracking under the weight of the scandal, if only because the sheriff is well-liked, and if his own home could be hiding a monster like his son, then how can anyone feel safe? 

While Stiles is awaiting sentencing, Peter searches for character witnesses. Well, Braeden does. It’s what he pays her very, very well to do. He’s not surprised though when she can’t find anyone prepared to tell the judge what a good kid Stiles Stilinski is. 

“What do you need a character witness for anyway?” Braeden asks, her voice crackling through the line. Cell phone service in Beacon Hills can be patchy when bad weather moves in. “I thought you said Eichen House was a slam dunk.” 

Peter’s currently standing in front of Eichen House as it happens, staring up at its very forbidding exterior and wondering if Stiles will ever thank him for getting him sent here instead of an actual prison. Still, what the hell does it matter if it looks straight off the cover of a cheap gothic horror novel? It’s not like Stiles will see the outside, right? 

“I don’t like to leave any room for error,” he tells her. “Surely someone remembers him mowing their lawn, or selling Boy Scout cookies.” 

“Boy Scouts don’t sell cookies,” Braeden says. 

“Well, they’re idiots then.” Peter watches someone move back and forth in front of a window on the third floor. Their movements are jerky, unsettled. “There must be someone in town who has at least something good to say about him. A teacher? A neighbour? A priest?” 

Braeden’s silence says too much. 

“Braeden?”

“Peter.” She exhales. “Maybe you need to talk to Derek.” 

Peter blinks rapidly. “Derek? My _nephew_ Derek?” 

“Talk to Derek,” Braeden says and ends the call. 

*****

Medieval dentistry is less excruciating than talking to Derek. Peter talks for a living—words flow easily, both illuminating and obfuscating according to his will. Derek is… Peter loves his nephew, but talking to Derek is like talking to a brick wall. He’s always been quiet, but there’s something about him when Peter confronts him in the shed where he’s working on building a birdhouse or a mailbox or something, that Peter suspects is more than his usual reserve. Peter doesn’t need to be a werewolf to sniff out Derek’s anxiety.

How old is Derek these days? Pater does the math quickly in his head. Twenty? Twenty-one? He’s grown up nicely. His head finally fits his ears, for starters. He looks like a man these days, even though his eyes are still a pup’s. He looks so very, very young as he darts nervous glances in Peter’s direction, and tries to pretend he’s not nervous. 

“I went to Eichen House today,” Peter says, because that seems as good a place as any to start a conversation. 

Derek planes a piece of wood, and the sweet scent of sawdust fills the air. 

“It’s…” Peter considers his answer and then shrugs. “Well, it’s better than prison, I suppose.” 

They both know that’s not saying much. 

Still, Peter had spoken to Dr. Morrell at length. She knows what he is, and vice versa. They both know that Eichen House extends far underground, and that the patients kept there aren’t anything like the ones kept in the rest of the rooms. The basement levels of Eichen House are for the supernatural creatures that most of the world doesn’t know exist. 

Peter, whose werewolf biology pinged just about every alarm in the place—magical or otherwise—had to be escorted into Eichen personally by Dr. Morrell. It doesn’t look it, but the place is locked down hard against supernaturals—to prevent both escape and, Peter suspects, attack. In addition to being a psychologist, Marin Morrell is a druid. It’s no contradiction, Peter supposes; it’s all about finding balance. 

Derek shoots him a worried look, and Peter feels a sudden rush of loss for the smiling little boy he remembers. He was always quiet, but he smiled. 

“He doesn’t appear to have had many friends,” Peter says, and Derek jolts. “I can barely find anyone who admits having known him.” 

Derek’s throat bobs as he swallows. He straightens up and wipes his palms on his jeans. “I… I know him.” 

And then the whole story tumbles out. 

It’s a story of two boys, one alone mostly by choice and one alone but aching not to be, and how they met each other in the Preserve and—

 _“This is private property,”_ Derek said, but the kid just wrinkled his nose and shrugged and kept talking anyway. 

—and they kept meeting. 

It doesn’t take long for Peter to see the truth. Derek _loves_ Stiles. Peter doesn’t even know how that’s possible; Stiles is blank-eyed and cold. Stiles has ice in his veins, and a stare that makes a wolf’s skin prickle and his hackles rise. There must be something that Peter isn’t seeing. 

“Tell me about him,” he says. “Tell me about Stiles.” 

And Derek tells him about a boy who never shuts up, who flails when he moves, who wears graphic tees and plaid shirts and a stupid grin. He describes a boy still growing into his limbs, as clumsy as a half-grown pup, who displays flashes of unexpected grace and quiet. 

“He talks a lot,” Derek says. “But sometimes it’s about what he’s _not_ saying. He’s loud, but that’s… that’s so people don’t see what he’s really like.” 

“What’s he really like?” Peter asks. 

Derek looks like he’s close to tears. “He’s brave and loyal and… and he loves me.” 

Impossible.

Peter had three different doctors’ reports in his briefcase saying that Stiles doesn’t love. That he _can’t_. That his brain just isn’t wired that way. Stiles might have learned how to be a skilled mimic, but he doesn’t feel it. 

And yet… 

Derek is a wolf. He can read scents and hear heartbeats. 

There is something here that Peter is missing. 

“We’d meet in the woods,” Derek says, his voice soft and close to breaking. “He didn’t… he didn’t know what I was, but he used to say the Preserve was magical. He said sometimes he thought he heard music.” 

Peter’s breath catches. 

“He said…” Derek swipes his tongue over his bottom lip. “He said he fell asleep once in his bed, and dreamed someone was calling him, and then he woke up in the Preserve.” 

_Dementia_ , Peter thinks. _Hallucinations. Dissociative disorder._

“Uncle Peter.” Derek swallows again. “There’s… there’s nothing in the Preserve, is there?” 

“No.” Peter’s voice rasps. “No, that would be impossible.” 

There’s nothing in the Preserve. The Nemeton protects the land from all supernatural threats. The Hale territory is safe. It’s always been safe. 

“He said he heard voices,” Derek says. 

“That’s what happens with people with his condition,” Peter says, but he hears a voice of his own, coming from the back of his mind: _But what if it’s something else?_ How is he supposed to tell the difference between the crazy and the supernatural in a world where both exist? 

“He loves his dad,” Derek says. His voice breaks, and his eyes fill with tears. “And… and _Tara_. God. I don’t know what happened, Uncle Peter. He could never—” A hitch in his breath. “I don’t understand. He loves his dad so much.” 

Outside, the wind whispers in the trees and Peter imagines hearing voices floating on it. 

***** 

Stiles Stilinski is sentenced and admitted to the secure forensic ward of Eichen House without fuss. Peter feels no joy in the fact; he doubts anyone does. Still, the prosecutor doesn’t fight too hard to have Stiles sent to prison instead. As long as he’s off the street. Everyone wins, Peter supposes, although it doesn’t feel that way. 

He finishes up his paperwork, and then packs everything away in his briefcase. Pauses as he heads for the parking lot, thinking of the curve of Stiles’s smile as his sentence was handed down. Like he was genuinely _happy_. It made no sense to Peter, but of course it doesn’t have to. Stiles is crazy. 

The rain hits just as Peter leaves the edge of town behind. 

The wipers of Peter’s car flick back and forth across the windshield. Lightning crashes somewhere beyond the trees. Peter just wants to get back to the house and start packing. He can be on a flight to the east coast tomorrow morning. 

The Preserve seems to close in, dark and forbidding, and unease prickles the base of Peter’s skull. 

_What if it’s something else?_

What if there is something out in those trees, or at least there was? Right up until it met a skinny, clumsy boy traipsing through the woods on the way to meet his secret boyfriend. It’s impossible. Everything Peter knows tells him that it’s impossible. 

And yet… 

Peter growls, and presses his foot on the gas. He needs to get the hell out of Beacon Hills and get back to New York, and that’s exactly what he intends to tell Talia when he reaches the house. 

Except when he reaches the house, Talia’s already dealing with a recalcitrant beta. 

“Well, I don’t care what he said he was doing tomorrow. Where is he now?” She sighs into her phone. “Cora, he said he was meeting you at the library!” She pauses. “Well where the hell are _you_?” 

“Teenagers,” Peter says with a shrug when Talia ends the call with a frustrated huff. 

“Cora is at a boy’s house!” Talia exclaims. “Who the hell is Isaac? Do we know an Isaac?” She shoves her phone in her pocket. “And I’ve got no idea where Derek is!” 

Peter wonders if she ever did, in all the long months he’s been sneaking away to meet up with Stiles under the trees. 

But he’s pretty sure he knows where Derek is now. 

“I’m going out,” he says. “I’ll see you later.” 

“Peter! Where are you going?” 

“I’m not one of your kids, Tee,” he calls back. 

He’s out the door and in the car before she can yell at him. 

He follows the road back toward town, squinting through the driving rain. He takes the turnoff to the highway before he reaches the town limits. Drives another six miles to Eichen House. He pulls up in front of it at the same moment a bolt of lightning illuminates that ghastly gothic exterior and makes him feel as though he’s just walked onto the set of a horror movie. 

Lucky he’s a werewolf then, he supposes, and not a blonde sorority girl. 

He turns the collar of his jacket up against the rain as he makes his way to the entrance. 

“I need to see Stiles Stilinski,” he says, showing the woman at the reception desk his ID.

“Are you family?” she asks. 

“I’m his attorney,” Peter says, and then raises his eyebrows. “Why? Has his family visited?”

The woman checks the book. “His cousin is visiting now.” 

His _cousin_.

Stiles doesn’t have a cousin. 

Peter’s surprised that Derek had the balls to try something like this, to be honest. Rushing off to visit his criminally insane boyfriend on his first day of incarceration? That seems more like a Cora scenario. 

“He’s allowed visitors?” he asks. “Already?” 

“Under strict supervision,” the woman tells him. 

Except when an orderly arrives to take Peter up to the secure unit, the supervision—a much bigger orderly than the one escorting Peter—is lying on the floor with blood oozing from a head wound, and Stiles’s room is empty. 

Peter’s orderly hits a silent alarm, and tends to his wounded colleague. 

Peter lifts his face to the cold, stale air, and follows Derek’s scent. 

Down, down, down. 

His heart beats faster as he approaches the basement entry. There’s another orderly here, his keycard torn off his lanyard and discarded underneath the door scanner. Peter checks the man for a pulse, and then picks up the keycard. He swipes it against the scanner, and waits until the red light blinks green. 

He pushes the door open. 

The smell hits him first: dozens of supernatural creatures, their scents mingling, competing, and pulling Peter’s beta shift close to the surface. A growl rumbles in the back of his throat and is answered by an unearthly shriek from whatever creature lurks behind the door of the first cell. Peter ignores it, and hurries down the corridor. 

A second basement level proves identical to the first, lined with closed cells, and then Peter pushes open a door that leads down into darkness. There’s a faint flickering light at the bottom of the steps. Peter descends the steps slowly. He hears Derek before he rounds the corner and sees him: 

“Stiles. Stiles, what are we doing down here?” 

Peter steps inside the dark little brick room. Everything stinks of damp and dirt, and of Derek’s rising anxiety. And Stiles...Stiles, crouched down by the brick wall, scrabbling at it with his fingers, smells of nothing at all. Why has Peter never noticed that before? 

“What are you?” he rasps. 

Derek turns first, his eyes wide and guilty, but Peter barely sees him. He won’t take his gaze off the predator. Stiles’s face is blank for a fraction too long, but then his mouth curves into a smile, and his dark eyes dance with delight. 

“Counsellor,” he says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” 

“What are you?” Peter repeats. 

Its grin grows. 

“Void isn’t Stiles’s second personality,” Peter says, stepping forward into the dank little room. “It’s _you_. What are you?” 

The thing hesitates for a moment as though it’s considering the question. “People have called me a few names in the thousand years I’ve been here. Devil, evil spirit… none of them have been very creative. I have always preferred my real name.” 

Peter feels a chill as it stares at him, and swears he can feel the weight and the echo of a thousand years—of a thousand voices—in its tone. 

Its dark eyes gleam. “ _Nogitsune_.”

“Stiles,” Derek says, and reaches out a trembling hand toward the thing. 

And for a moment Peter doesn’t understand how his nephew isn’t recoiling from the creature, but then its expression shifts, its eyes widening with doe-like softness. 

“Help me, Der,” it says, its voice trembling, childlike, afraid. “Please help me. Don’t leave me alone with it!” 

“I won’t,” Derek says. “I won’t, Stiles.” 

“What do you want?” Peter asks. “Why are you here?” 

“I want what they stole from me,” the nogitsune says, expression shuttering once more. “I want what they buried in these walls. I want my power back.” 

“What’s in the walls?” Peter asks. 

The nogitsune reaches out for Derek’s hand, and curls it into a fist. “Show me how strong you are, puppy dog.” 

It indicates a place on the wall, and Derek, wide-eyes, punches. 

***** 

It’s a corpse. It’s been in the walls long enough that there’s no real stench to it anymore. It just smells faintly damp and musty. The corpse is wrapped in bandages. A withered hand extends from a clump of them, fingers twisted like old, dried roots. 

The nogitsune hauls the body out of the wall cavity, and crouches over it. 

“Here you are,” it whispers to the corpse, croons, and then flashes a cold smile at Peter. “She trapped my spark when I left this body. But it’s still here, I can feel it.” Its long, thin fingers dance across the hollowed-out chest of the corpse, and tear at the rotting bandages. 

A cloud of black flies rise from the corpse’s chest cavity, and the nogitsune laughs, and reaches out quickly and plucks one from the air. The others turn to ashes, and drift down to the dirty floor. 

“There you are,” the nogitsune murmurs. “There you are at last.” 

All of this, Peter thinks, to get into Eichen House, to get to this moment. 

The nogitsune rises to its feet, one fist clenched around the fly. It reaches out with its other hand and trails its fingers down Derek’s cheek. “Did he ever tell you he was scared of the dark?” it asks, eyes bright. “Oh, but he went into the woods anyway, didn’t he? To meet you in secret. You made it so easy for me, puppy, when you begged him to walk through the dark woods, all alone.” 

Derek’s jaw trembles.

“And now look at me,” the nogitsune says, biting its bottom lip. “Look at me, _Der._ Now I’m wearing your favourite little meatsuit, and I’m zipped up so tight in here that if you try to pull me out, you’ll rip your little bitch to pieces!” 

Derek growls, and the creature’s eyes fill with tears. 

“Derek!” it gasps. “Der!”

Tears slide down its cheeks, but it doesn’t unclench its fist. 

It’s playing him. 

Peter growls too, and moves forward. His claws extend, his fangs drop, and—

A flick of the nogistune’s wrist, and he’s flung against the far wall. His spine cracks when he hits it, and he slumps to the floor, white-shards of pain stabbing through him as his body tries to remember how to heal. He watches, grimacing in agony, as the nogitsune steps up in front of Derek. 

“Let him go,” Derek croaks out. 

“What are you going to do, Derek?” the nogitsune whispers. “Are you going to run and tell your momma, the alpha? How about your pack emissary?” It laughs suddenly. “Maybe you can go to the police station, and tell him how your poor Stiles is being held against his will in his own body? Except, uh oh, they don’t like him much down there, do they? They don’t like how he shot that woman in the head, then…” It shivers, as though pleasure is running through it. “Then it peeled the sheriff’s chest open like a piece of overripe fruit, and held his beating heart in his hand.” 

The nogitsune tilts its head back, biting its lip as its eyes flutter closed. A shudder runs through it, and it gives a pleasurable groan. It raises its fist to its mouth, and swallows down the black, buzzing fly. 

Peter tastes bile. 

“You…” Derek shakes his head. “You’re a _monster_.” 

The nogitsune’s eyes turn cold. Its smile fades, and then those amber eyes are back. “Derek. Derek, don’t leave me alone with it!” 

Peter tries to struggle to his feet, but his spine is still cracked. Derek glances over at him, his eyes wide, his mouth set. There’s an apology in his gaze, or at least an acknowledgement, and there’s also something else that Peter hasn’t seen there before, and never wants to see again: hollow resignation. 

“I’m sorry,” Derek says to the thing wearing Stiles’s face, and maybe even to Stiles as well. “I won’t leave you alone with it.” 

And then he drives his claws into the nogitsune’s chest and rips its heart out. 

There’s a sudden flash of light, and the entire world explodes. 

***** 

“I’m a thousand years old,” a small voice says. “You can’t kill me. Der? You can’t kill me.” 

And then it’s gone. 

***** 

Peter coughs and chokes on dirt and dust as he climbs to his feet. He blinks to clear his vision, and sees Derek kneeling on the ground over Stiles’s body. One trembling fist is covered in blood. 

Peter stumbles over to him, and goes down onto his knees beside him. There’s a nuzzling in his ears, louder and louder, and—

No, not in his ears. It’s coming from Derek’s fist. The fly. 

“It burns,” Derek says, but only clenches tighter. 

Peter curls his own fingers over Derek’s. He can feel Derek’s fist shaking as the fly tries to escape. He can smell burning flesh, and Derek’s eyes flash and his fangs appear as he fights the pain. 

And then it’s done. It stops, and Peter drops his hand. Derek opens his fist, and ashes float down. One smudges against Stiles’s cheek like the shadow of a tear. 

“I…” Derek looks down at Stiles’s body. He whimpers. 

“We need to go,” Peter says. “We need to get you out of here.” 

He staggers to his feet, and puts a hand on Derek’s shoulder. Derek drops his head, a whine rising in the back of his throat. He presses a hand against Stiles’s pale cheek, leaving bloody streaks. Stiles’s dead eyes stare up at nothing. 

“Stiles,” Derek whispers, rubbing his thumb along Stiles’s cheekbone. “God. I’m so sorry, Stiles!” 

“Derek.” Peter digs his claws into Derek’s shoulder, just hard enough to get his attention. “There’s nothing you can do. We need to leave.” 

He draws Derek to his feet, and leads him to the door. 

His blood freezes when he hears the sudden, sharp intake of breath in the room behind him. He turns, but Stiles’s body hasn’t moved. His chest is still an open cavity, and his dead eyes are still fixed on the ceiling. 

The… 

The bandaged corpse that the creature pulled from the wall. 

It twitches, and then moves. Rubble and dirt shift underneath it. Another rasping breath, and then the corpse is jerking violently on the floor, panicked, muffled noises coming from behind the bandages. A pale white hand—no longer desiccated and withered—tears frantically at the bandages as the thing writhes on the floor like a drowning man. 

And then the hand tugs the rotting fabric mask away, and a pair of wide amber eyes stare out at them, and Stiles sucks in a rasping, shuddering breath. 

“Derek?” he rasps. And then his gaze falls on the identical dead body lying on the floor in front of him, its chest torn open, and he screams. 

***** 

Peter doesn’t go back to New York. He’s not sure why; he only knows that it’s more than the pack bonds urging him to stay. He watches the Preserve, and wonders if anything watches him back. 

Small town life continues on in Beacon Hills, the same as it always did. Eichen House continues to operate, even after the gas explosion that killed one of their patients. 

John Stilinski leaves hospital, and quits his job. Nobody blames him for that. 

Nobody leaves flowers on Stiles Stilinski’s grave. The headstone is vandalised twice in the month after it’s put up. After the second time, John doesn’t pay for a replacement and Stiles, Peter supposes, will eventually be forgotten. 

It’s safer that way. 

In a little cabin in the woods, in the heart of the Hale territory, an amber-eyed boy is quieter than he ever was before. Peter doesn’t know if that is because of his trauma, or because there’s a piece of the nogitsune still in him. He has its memories; maybe those aren’t all it left in him. 

But Stiles is quieter, and sometimes Peter catches him staring at his own skin, or his fingers, or at his face in the mirror, and if Peter’s skin crawls thinking of this body and where it came from, then how does Stiles not wake up every night screaming? 

Perhaps he does. 

It takes a little while to organise a fake passport that will pass the test in the modern world of biometrics, but Peter knows people. Stiles wasn’t his first guilty client; there are important men with criminal underground connections who Peter represented back in New York. He calls in some favours. 

“He’s a spark,” John says one evening, “just like his mother. That’s why he fought it for so long. That’s why Derek was able to rip it out of him—because he was already pushing from the inside.” 

“Did you know it wasn’t him?” Peter asks. “When he attacked you?” 

A shadow passes over John’s face. “No,” he says at last. “I thought it was my son.” 

That shadow, Peter suspects, will never quite leave John, or Stiles. It will always lie between them now. The knowledge of what the nogitsune did when it was wearing Stiles’s face. The things that the people in town say about Stiles. That vandalised headstone. The nogitsune might be gone, but nothing can ever take away what it did. 

Maybe Stiles will shed the weight of it, the shadow, the darkness it’s left behind, when he and Derek leave Beacon Hills. Maybe they’ll find a place where the sun is so bright that Stiles can no longer feel the coldness of the nogitsune’s grasp in every molecule. Maybe they’ll remember how to be happy and carefree again. Maybe their love will be enough. 

He scraps the _maybe_ , and decides that it will. 

Why the hell not? 

Peter’s seen enough impossible things lately that he chooses wholeheartedly to believe it. 

  
  



End file.
